Books and articles across borders and languages (1990-2015) [contents]

[Overview]
After Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1990, books and articles could be accessed more easily. New media, new bookstores and new libraries helped cross national borders. Authors and journalists started working together at a distance. Internet users who didn’t have English as a mother tongue reached 5 percent in summer 1994, 20 percent in summer 1998, 50 percent in summer 2000, and 75 percent in summer 2015. Some of them could read English, and a number of them couldn’t read English at all. The web saw the rise of “linguistic democracy” and the development of “language nations”, both large and small. Many dedicated people helped promoting their own language and culture, or the language and culture of others, while using English as a lingua franca. These people were linguists, librarians, programmers, professors, researchers, marketing consultants, and so on. In a short time they made the web truly multilingual, with bilingual or trilingual web sites, language-related resources, reference dictionaries, multilingual encyclopedias and translation software. This book is based on many interviews conducted for fifteen years in Europe, in America, in Africa and in Asia. Also available in French and Spanish.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

# INTRODUCTION

# THE WEB, FROM ENGLISH TO MULTILINGUAL
= From ASCII to Unicode
= The “Web Language Hit Parade” (Babel)
= “The Multilingual Web Guide” (O’Reilly)
= The example of French as a non-English language
= Europe and its many languages
= E-commerce, an incentive for plurilingualism
= The need for bilingual or trilingual information
= Collaboration across borders

# WRITTEN MEDIA ACROSS BORDERS
= Major printed newspapers went online
= The internet and other media
= Electronic titles without a print version
= Multimedia convergence
= Unemployment, retraining and telework

# BOOKSTORES ACROSS BORDERS
= The Internet BookShop paved the way
= Amazon in France
= And the small bookstores?
= eBookStores